News

Lamotrigine is an important option in bipolar disorders. However, many clinicians also use it in patients with a (unipolar) depressive disorder who have not responded adequately to conventional antidepressants.

How frequently do you find yourself prescribing antibiotics for inpatients with schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders during hospitalization?

All psychiatry, anywhere in the world, is American psychiatry. This is both good and bad.

This smartphone-friendly version of the HAM-D (Hamilton Depression Rating Scale) measures levels of depression and probes the severity of symptoms, such as mood, guilt, suicidal thoughts, sleep, and anxiety.

This iPhone and Android-friendly Bipolar Spectrum Diagnostic Scale (BSDS) is found most helpful in detecting not only severe cases of bipolar disorder but also patients who fall into the “softer” end of the bipolar spectrum.

This article explains and demonstrates the importance of psychiatric advance directives and the benefits and obstacles involved in implementing them.

Family involvement is often misunderstood as being a hindrance to individuation, when in fact family-oriented interventions can improve patient functioning, agency, and autonomy.

This book draws together the entire spectrum of the relevant psychosocial dimensions and data necessary to adequately assist in the evaluation and treatment of patients who may be candidates for bariatric surgery.

American psychiatrists might be able to sympathize in the wake of recent mass tragedies leading to new, hastily conceived laws that directly impinge on psychiatric practice, confidentiality, and duty to protect third parties.

Periprocedural advancements, including liberalization of concomitant and pre-treatment medications, add to the comfort and tolerability of ECT.

On December 18, 2012, French psychiatrist Daniele Canarelli, age 58, received a 1-year suspended prison sentence by the Criminal Court of Marseille after one of her patients killed someone.

The extent to which antidepressant use during pregnancy is associated with increased risks of postnatal adaptation syndrome, persistent pulmonary hypertension in the newborn, first-trimester teratogenicity, stillbirth, and infant mortality is explored in 2 recent studies. A close up look here. . .

Both clinicians and weather forecasters employ the same general process of information gathering, analysis, and reaching a conclusion.

spring-time territory, raucous and free as a New Orleans . . . trumpet, my patient locked-in to the wild tune

Psychiatry residents can carve out a career in the area of psychiatry that interests them. If drawn to specialized topics, such as atypical bipolar disorder, club drugs, glutamate transporters, or genetic links to autism, then they should pursue those avenues.

Because the aftermath of sexual violence can result in suicidal feelings, depression, PTSD, and other mental disorders, clinicians play an important role in treating both victims and perpetrators and helping to prevent further damage.

President Barack Obama proposed a new research initiative designed to further study and better understand, treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders including Alzheimer disease, traumatic brain injury, autism, posttraumatic stress disorder, and schizophrenia.

This mobile-friendly Vanderbilt ADHD Rating Scale follows closely the criteria set forth in DSM-IV and has been customized to make smartphone observations in the office and treatment environments.

Developed by M.Hamilton, this widely-used interview scale measures the severity of a patient's anxiety, based on 14 parameters, including anxious mood, tension, fears, insomnia, somatic complaints and behavior at the interview.

The liveliest debate in psychiatry today is where to draw the line between mental disorder and mental health. So much rides on the decision-who gets treated and how, who pays for it, whether a criminal is deemed mad or bad, whether someone gets damages in tort cases, who qualifies for disability payments and eligibility for extra school services, whether someone can adopt a child-and there's a whole lot more.

In our time, it seems that the number of psychiatrists who believe in a God are increasing, parallel with the decreasing influence of Freud’s ideas.

When critics of psychiatric diagnosis insist that terms like “schizophrenia” or “bipolar disorder” are inherently stigmatizing, they are unwittingly perpetuating the very prejudice they wish to end. It is time to shine a bright light on this self-fulfilling prophecy.

What Skype does not offer is a means of communication clearly suitable for clinical services-especially in mental health and psychiatry.

Medication side effects of weight gain and increased appetite, together with non-adherence often found in persons with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other serious mental illnesses, have challenged clinicians in the past.

Patients with borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder (or both) can feel entitled to special treatment and often seek only approving forms of attention from those who treat them.

Mental illness is a risk factor for HIV infection. It brings a number of behavioral correlates that put patients at risk for getting infected. As HIV infection worsens, it begins to affect the brain, and cyclical relationship between the disease and mental illness begins.

While the diagnostic categories of DSM-III and DSM-IV (and soon DSM-5) have provided the basis for much useful research, little has been written about how much of DSM-and how much “evidence-based medicine”-is built on a foundation of fantasy.

Outpatient psychiatry is a critical experience in becoming an independent psychiatrist.

The day began on a high note. As I sat and talked with an elderly patient sitting in her wheelchair, quiet, not remembering much, she suddenly broke out in song.